The Cleaner

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The next day is work as usual. The old guy giving the forecast earns his pay by getting things right. I guess he’s looking out the window at the frost rather than reading off the report in his hand. My biggest concern is running into Detective Calhoun. I use the stairs rather than the elevator, scratching at my crotch the entire way down. In the foyer a bunch of tourists is being given directions by the doorman in English, which they are having trouble understanding. A few taxi drivers carrying luggage to and from taxis. People checking in. People checking out. No Calhoun. I look outside. The storm clouds last night weren’t bluffing. Every surface I can see is wet.

I check out of the hotel. I keep looking around so often that the hotel clerk must think I’m paranoid. There aren’t any extra charges. The clerk asks me if I’ve had a pleasant stay, and I tell him I have. He asks me where I’m from, and I realize I can’t say Christchurch, because then I’d look like an idiot. Who the hell spends a few nights in a five-star hotel in their own city? I tell him I’m from up north. He asks me exactly where, and I suddenly understand why he is asking all these questions-he is hitting on me. I tell him Auckland, and he tells me he is from Auckland too. He tells me it’s a small world. I tell him it’s not small enough, and he has to think about this for a few seconds until he realizes that in my small world he wouldn’t even exist. I can actually see his thought process as his smile slowly disappears.

I walk to work. It’s one of those nothing kind of days, where it could end up being sunny or could end up raining but you just don’t know and don’t really care. I’m feeling good about a whole lot of different things, among them that my testicle isn’t itching this morning. Sally is on my floor when I get to work. She looks me up and down. She seems distracted.

“Do anything exciting last night?” she asks.

Here we go again, back to people’s fascinations about what other people do with their time. “Not much. Just stayed at home and watched TV.”

“Sounds nice,” she says, then walks off.

I begin my day with cleaning the toilets on the first floor. The body of the crippled woman is found. Tragic, apparently. Inhumane too, people are saying. A disgraceful country we must be living in, according to the news. Where will it end? people keep asking, but nobody asks me. In my office, I use a felt marker to darken the spots of blood on my overalls and make them look like ink stains.

While the stressed-out detectives look for the killer, I sit in my office and make a call with the cell phone. I sit with my chair against the door just in case Sally comes along and tries to come in.

Detective Calhoun answers. I apologize for not meeting him two nights ago. He tells me exactly what he thinks of me. We exchange a few more pleasantries before agreeing to meet once again, this time at six o’clock tonight, at the Walker house. Reluctantly, he agrees. Without thanking me, he hangs up.

After lunch, I listen closely to find out if the detectives are plotting to stake out the Walker place. Nobody makes any reference to it. Calhoun has kept the information to himself. That means he’s sticking with his game plan of killing me. Then suddenly everything around the station gets even busier. I don’t get the details, but enough to know another body has been found this morning-this one nothing to do with me. Some guy has gotten himself killed in a pretty nasty way at a church somewhere here in town. So the workload is doubled because now they have the dead woman in the wheelchair, and the dead guy at the church, and what they really need is twice as many cops.

Every half hour or so I run into Sally, but she doesn’t seem in the mood for talking. She’ll look at me from the end of a corridor or stairway, and she’ll stare at me with this look on her face that suggests she is lost, but not once does she come up to me and make the sort of inane conversation that makes me want to scream. I must admit I miss the lunches she makes, and I make a mental note to suggest my hunger to her so it may inspire her to start making them again.

Four thirty rolls along, and with it, the chance to enjoy my day. Back in my office I make another cell phone call, this one also to the police station. I ask to speak to somebody in homicide. When I say I may have some information, I’m transferred directly to Carl Schroder’s phone.

I skip the part where I’m supposed to give him my name, telling him I know how these things work, and although I’m willing to help, I’m not prepared to testify in court for reasons I don’t want to discuss, but which mostly involve my own safety. He disagrees with my fears, but doesn’t push it, probably because ninety-five percent of calls he gets are from crackpots. Regardless, he sounds desperate to know what I know. I tell him it isn’t what I know, but what I’ve found. I give him directions to the trash dumpster three blocks away from last night’s crime scene. When asked how I found it there, I answer by telling him I saw a man dropping it off, and once I learned of the murder today, I decided to call them.

A brief description of the man?

Sure. Why not? I give a brief description of Calhoun before hanging up on more questions. It’s nothing like the picture of “me” hanging in the conference room.

When I get home, I take about three steps before sensing something is different, but I can’t figure out what. It’s as if somebody has come through here and shifted everything a few degrees out of whack. I stand in one spot, turning a complete circle, but in the end I can’t come up with any tangible reason why I should feel something is out of place. It’s just a feeling. Maybe Melissa has been back here. Maybe she hasn’t.

I slip on a pair of latex gloves and put my hands under the mattress, searching for the parking ticket I kept as a memento months ago. Only I can’t find it. I bury my arms in until I’m up to my shoulders, swirling them around, searching, searching. . but it’s gone.

Melissa?

Why would she even look here?

But I already know why. People hide things under their mattresses all the time. It was stupid of me to hide the ticket there.

But then I remember flipping the bed when trying to get hold of that stupid cat. I get down on my hands and knees and look under it, and sure enough, there’s the ticket. I put it in my briefcase, then take off my gloves.

After walking a few blocks, I use the usual mode of illegal transport to make my way to the house where I’m meeting Calhoun. Each of us is intending to kill the other, though, supposedly, neither of us knows that. By the time I get there it is five forty. I’m sure I’ve beaten Calhoun because he has a long day dealing with the dead.

I park several blocks away and walk. The night is as cold as the morning, and I fear winter may end up being just as long as summer. When I reach the house, I suddenly have this fear that maybe the residents have moved back in and family life is under way again. I suck in a few deep breaths. No, if anybody was living here, I’d have heard about it by now.

I use my skills to unlock the front door and use my foot to close it behind me. I stand still in the hallway and listen for sounds of life. No one here. The bedroom seems the place to be, since it has the most history now, so I head there first. I open my briefcase and, regretting the lack of a firearm that could end this whole drama quickly, I pull out a hammer. Under the circumstances it’s the best I can do. But looking at it, the hammer seems the wrong way to go-too easy to end up putting a hole in his skull and killing him. I head to the kitchen to look for something better. I return to the bedroom, now the proud owner of a large frying pan. It’s nonstick.

I sit on the bed and watch the hands on my watch tick around, waiting for Detective Calhoun to arrive.